What’s Happenin’ ?

Not much...

Barbie writing here… let me get you up to date with what we have been doing since the last blog posting.

The day before Jeff’s birthday, Thursday, July 21, I “surprised” Jeff with a neat picnic lunch at Black Rock Mountain State Park in the Mountain City area of Georgia. It is only a 15 minute drive from our site at River Vista. The day was hot in Dillard but by the time we made it to the top of the mountain it was 7 degrees cooler, at 82 degrees. We had a beautiful view (check out the pictures below) and a wonderful lunch, according to Jeff.

 

   

   

   

This was Kozmo’s first picnic and she even enjoyed it. I had made a four cheese pasta dish with chicken, peas, garlic, mozzarella cheese and olive oil with seasonings. We also had our first heirloom tomato from the plant that I have been cultivating out on our deck. It was delicious! I can’t believe I have the ability to plant something and actually keep it alive and produce something so good!!! LOL Anyway, we also had homemade peanut butter chocolate chip cookies and a sangria jello for dessert. The time was relaxing and gorgeous. We met another couple from Gainesville, Georgia who were up for the day enjoying their picnic, also. We found out they have a Jayco fifth wheel and a Labrador retriever whom they adopted a few years back. Kozmo didn’t get too close to the pup because they were afraid their pup might do something to her. She was ready to give out kisses though. :-)

On to Friday, July 22, Jeff turned 59 years young. We celebrated by eating out at The Stockton House in Clayton. The food was fantastic! Jeff had chicken marsala and I had the trout almondine. No dessert for us since we had waiting for us at home a chocolate “wacky” cake with milk chocolate/peanut butter icing that I made for the birthday “boy.” It is a very easy cake with no eggs or butter in it. The Stockton House is a nice place but really needs to tend to its growth of foliage leading up the stairs to the entrance.

The rest of the weekend was devoted to cleaning, laundry, reading and computer “traveling”. I cooked some darn good meals over the past week, like crab cakes and a spinach salad, fresh creamed yellow squash with a ground beef tomato sauced pasta dish, and another spinach dish with roasted sweet potatoes, onions and walnuts with a mustard based dressing.  We also managed to eat at Mishima Express in Clayton with both of us getting hibachi chicken dinners. This is a great Japanese style cooking restaurant! We ate at the Valley Café for breakfast on Thursday, July 28 and took a walk through Fred’s discount store and didn’t see much of anything there. On Friday, July 29, we went to Oinkers for “lupper” and it was fantastic….again!

It has been hot up here, as it is probably in a lot of places. But the nights are not that bad. When I usually take Kozmo out at 11:00 P.M. it is warm but not stifling. By the way Kozmo has developed many “hobbies” lately. She loves taking golf cart rides with us looking for rabbits, walking down by the stream and watching the ground move because of the ground moles that have built their tunnels almost everywhere, and jumping back and forth inside the rig from Jeff to me when she sees hummingbirds on the window feeder on my side and doves and other birds in the bird feeder on Jeff’s side. I am constantly looking down at the ground now to make sure those ground moles don’t appear and bite us. We haven’t seen any since they come out at night. Kozmo is really fitting into the “Boldt Retirement Home” very nicely!

We have started seriously looking for campgrounds that we will be staying at when we head to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Selma, North Carolina area in September to visit family. We have decided not to head for the Indiana and Ohio areas since we don’t want to be on the road longer than 3 ½ to 4 weeks for this trip. Jeff is really getting into DJ’ing here at the park and we don’t want to miss out on all the Fall festivities around here. Speaking of DJing gigs, the owner of the campground confirmed with Jeff this afternoon another street dance to be held next Saturday here at River Vista. Dillard is hosting the Kansas City Barbeque Society’s Georgia State Championship Bluegrass & Barbeque Festival next Friday and Saturday. There is a near full house expected here at the campground. After folks get their fill of Bluegrass & Barbeque they can come back to River Vista and kick up their heels to some good old time rock and roll, country and dance favorites. It’ll be a good time, after all Big Daddy DJ will be playing the favorites!

Until next time…live for the moment!

Good Friends

We had a great time with our great friends Linda and Bill Forrest on July 11^th and 12^th.

They live in Auburndale, Florida. Barbie worked with Linda at Mann Middle School. She is still teaching 8^th grade history there. They  became close friends and just love it when they get together. They had bought a Class A motorhome this past year and stopped to visit towing their utility trailer, which houses their Gold Wing motorcycle. They stayed for two nights here at River Vista. They were headed to West Virginia to pick up their son and his family and then travel to Maine to visit family and have a good time. We took them to Fatz Café in Franklin, NC, which is 20 minutes north on US 441, Monday night and had a fantastic meal! After eating breakfast out Tuesday morning at Kountry Vittles (which took 45 minutes to get the meal), Linda and Bill went for a motorcycle ride to South and North Carolina. The weather was nice and not hot so their ride was fantastic. Barbie and I went to Ingles for some grocery shopping for the barbeque that we were making for the night. When 6 PM came around, Linda and Bill came up and we ate grilled burgers, potato salad and pea salad and then topped off the evening with homemade blueberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream. It was a great meal with great conversation. Linda brought some Reisling wine which made it even more entertaining. We went down to their rig at 9PM and they showed us their homemade laundry line made with PVC pipe which was attached to their ladder. That will be a project for me in the near future. We said our goodbyes Tuesday evening with the lightning bugs flashing in the night’s soft breeze.

Thursday, July 14 and Friday, July 15 were rainy type of days. We need the rain up here and we just sat around and read and cleaned up a bit. Our other great friends, Sandie and Pat Gregory and their two grandchildren, Kyle and Katherine, came by Friday to visit us.

   

They live in Brandon, Florida, and have the grandkids for two weeks. They own an rv site in Franklin, North Carolina in a place called Great Outdoors RV Resort.

They have a beautiful rv site at the crest of a cleared off hilltop with long range mountain views. They also have a cabin site in another area of the resort which will be developed later on. They stayed for a couple of hours and the grandkids are getting big and are very well behaved. Kozmo mainly stayed in my lap the whole time they were here. But Kyle did give her a treat which she tenderly took from his hand. They brought us some great corn on the cob which they picked themselves in North Carolina along with some beautiful sunflowers. They were headed to Santa’s Land in Cherokee, NC, on Saturday followed with horseback riding on Sunday before departing for Stone Mountain, Georgia, on Monday. We don’t have the energy to keep up with all that they do. They always have a great time though. After they left Barbie fixed us a taco salad dinner, which was very good.

Barbie has been cooking a lot so we treated ourselves to Mishima Express late Saturday afternoon. Kozmo stayed in the truck with the windows down since the temperature was 73 degrees. The food is great! We both usually have the hibachi chicken which comes with brown rice, carrots, and mushrooms on the side. With two iced teas, the bill was only $16 and it is a filling meal. Their house “shrimp” sauce that you can top off the meat and rice is truly outstanding.

We took a ride to Clayton on Monday to pick up prescriptions at Walgreens and then went to Highlands, North Carolina via Warwoman Road and Highway 28. It is a very curvy ride with nothing really around to look at except some beautiful mountains.

   

Our purpose was to make a deposit and get cash from the Bank of America, which has the closest branch for us in Highlands, NC. Highlands had temperatures of 73 degrees at 3:00 PM, the elevation being 4034 ft, and the place was very crowded. There wasn’t a place to park on the main drag so we decided to head back down to Dillard. You can really tell that the tourists are back when you head to Highlands on a Monday and see it so crowded.

Since my birthday is this Friday, Barbie has a surprise planned for me, so she says, on Thursday. She told me to pick a place to eat on Friday, which is what we usually do for our birthdays. She is hoping for great weather for the surprise Thursday, so my guess is a picnic up at Black Rock State Park??? She has been wanting to do that all summer. I’ll let you know.

‘Til next time…remember to live for the moment.

Late Night TV

I  probably should have written a blog about this topic long ago, but now is as good a time as any. We usually go to bed at 11:00pm  or earlier each night. Barbie and Kozmo will usually head to bed first and I will follow later, sometimes after I watch the 11:00 news. But, during the course of each weekday evening I’ll usually check the DirecTV guide to see which guests are on the late night talk shows. If there are some interesting guests I’ll DVR them so we can check them out the next day. At 11:30, it’s usually “The Late Show” with David Letterman. Every once in a while it may be “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. But at 12:35am, the ONLY show I’ve DVRed is “The Late Late Show” with Craig Ferguson. I got hooked on Ferguson only about a year ago when my back was shot and I spent my nights sleeping in my recliner chair and couldn’t sleep well at all because of the meds or whatever. He is a Scottish–American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, and producer. He took over “The Late Late Show” from Craig Wilborn in January 2005. The guy is hilarious. He has no co-host, no band but he has a talking “skeleton” machine, Geoff Peterson.

   Geoff Petersen

Geoff’s debut appearance was on Monday, April 5, 2010. Geoff Peterson was designed and built by Grant Imahara of the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters. He has neon blue eyes, a metal mohawk and wears an over-sized suit with his name scrawled on a contestant's name tag from The Price is Right. The robot is voiced by Josh Thompson, either live or as a set of pre-recorded phrases. Geoff makes comments regularly that contribute to the comedy of the show. There are “other” regulars such as “Secretariat”, a horse (2 humans in a horse costume) that dances out on stage for a brief appearance as Ferguson and the audience “dance” in the background. Occasionally, a white rabbit puppet manned by Ferguson, does the shows opening. Each guest’s segment ends one of 3 ways: 1) the guest may choose to play a “mouth organ”(harmonica) with Ferguson, 2) the guest my choose to have “an awkward pause” with Ferguson and most recently added, 3) the guest may choose to hold Ferguson’s “glittery ball”, which is a miniature mirrored disco ball. Needless to say, the show is filled with many sexual innuendos. I’m smiling or laughing the entire hour. If you’ve never checked it out, you really should…it is different.

What prompted this blog was that last night on Letterman’s Show he brought Regis Philbin to serve as his first ever co-host on “The Late Show.” The two of them together was hilarious. It was an awesome show. Ferguson followed with guest Julie Chen. I can tell you that we spent two great hours watching those show today.

Well, so much for late night tv.

‘Til next time……..

It’s July

This past week has been a busy one-yet enjoyable for sure. Last Monday we had a nice three hour plus visit and dinner with one of my former guidance counselors, Donna, from Tampa, FL. Donna was traveling to visit another former guidance counselor we both worked with, Nancy, who with her husband retired to a cabin in Murphy, NC a couple of years ago. Donna had called and we made plans for her to stop by our site here in Dillard, chat for awhile and catch a bite to eat before she moved on to Murphy where she planned to spend a couple of days. It was great visiting with Donna and getting caught up with the people I used to work with. We got a bite to eat at Mountain Man Grill here in Dillard just about a half mile from the NC state line on US 441. After some great burgers, we headed back to the 5er and Donna headed into NC. We also made tentative plans for Donna to drive up and visit us at our site in Crystal River, FL during the winter season.

The middle of the week was filled with running errands and enjoying “The Good Life.” Saturday, we drove to Franklin, NC, to a small arts and crafts show. We left seeing some nice local crafts but we resisted the urge to purchase anything.

River Vista was about 95% full for the July 4th weekend. There were cookouts, the pool was full all weekend, there were games and movies for the kids as well. Saturday evening a local woman and her son, who happen to be related to one of the work campers here at River Vista, played some old bluegrass tunes. Sunday was the big day. There was a golf cart and bicycle parade through the campground that included about 25 golf carts and a dozen bicycles or so.

As usual, CLICK on any picture to increase the size for better viewing.

Jacked up golf cart

The campground then hosted a hotdog cookout. For $1 you got a hotdog (with chili, sauerkraut, onions, relish, catsup, mustard, however you wanted it), a bag of potato chips and either iced tea or lemonade. They also had ice cream sundaes for 50 cents a scoop with toppings and there was also a watermelon seed spitting contest. All of those activities led up to the big “Street Dance” DJed  by yours truly at 7:00pm.

THE “Big Daddy DJ”

There was a great turnout for the dance with young and old, weekenders and River Vista Falls View residents in attendance. We played outside in front of the Mountain Village Center and the dance floor was the street. It worked out great. The weather cooperated and folks used the rocking chairs from outside the Mountain Village Center, the adirondack chairs from the playground, their golf carts and their own collapsible lawn chairs to sit on.

The Line-up

We played oldies, country, old time rock-n-roll and all type of dance favorites like: electric slide, polkas, conga, cha cha slide, Cupid shuffle, macarena, boot scootin’ boogie and more. It was a grand evening that we ended by playing an emotional “God Bless the USA.”

  

  

  

Apparently it was well received as we had numerous positive comments. The best part is the developer of River Vista, Clark, wants to sit down with me and discuss doing some future events. I’ll keep you posted.

Monday was a pretty laid back day until the local fireworks in Dillard and up in Franklin, NC in the evening. I don’t know if it was just me or not, but I saw fireworks over River Vista, or did I dream it ? :-)

  

  

‘Til next time……….

Day Trip: Hiawassee, Young Harris, Blairsville, Helen, Georgia

This is Barbie writing this blog today while Jeff tries his best to win spider solitaire. LOL

We went on a day trip this past Tuesday, June 21, to Hiawassee, Young Harris, Blairsville, Helen, and around the Lake Burton area on our way back. This area in northern Georgia has always been a favorite of ours. The day was a very nice one weather wise. It did get warm as the day progressed. The highest temperature was in Helen at 90 degrees. Of course Kozmo went with us and she had a nice time, so she told us later on in her doggy talk. We stopped first in Dillard for some diesel gas for the truck. It has come down in price being $3.82 per gallon in this area. We saw it just recently at $3.76 in Clayton. If it comes down more we will be saving some more money on our trip up north later in the summer and fall.

We enjoy riding around the Hiawassee area because Lake Chatuge and it’s coves seem to surround the town. It is a beautiful area. Hiawassee is also the home of the Georgia Mountain Fair which is held in August and has an abundance of local craftsmen and women demonstrating and selling their crafts. Many country acts perform as well. We’ve attended in past years and really enjoy it.

   

We made a stop at Vogel State Park to see the ducks and stretch our legs. As you can see by the picture, Kozmo really had a great time checking out the ducks!

In Helen, there were lots of tubers in the river having a great time.

   

We found that unusual for a Tuesday afternoon-all the tubers. Helen wasn’t too crowded but we drove through town and Kozmo got a close-up of a horse drawn carriage. For those of you that have never been there, Helen is a small alpine designed village that caters to the tourist industry.

   

 

   

 

We had to make a stop at Fred’s Peanuts in Robertstown, just outside of Helen, for some Cajun boiled peanuts and pork rinds. We can remember the first time we ever had Fred’s peanuts. Fred was younger then and the peanuts are just as good as they were 20 years ago. Notice Fred’s decor below.

 

    

We also stopped at Stovall’s Covered Bridge in Sautee, outside of Helen. Years ago we caught about a dozen trout right under that bridge. At that time we didn’t have an rv, so we cleaned them in our hotel room in Helen and iced them down for the trip back to Florida.

  

Also in that area we passed an Indian burial mound and the Old Sautee Store.

  

We had camped about 18 years ago at Unicoi Springs State Park in our 32 foot travel trailer. When we went through the campground Tuesday we didn’t see many places that our 39 foot fifth wheel could fit into today. Unicoi Springs is also the home of Anna Ruby Falls.

    

As we were coming back from Helen, we passed the Lake Burton Trout Hatchery where all the trout stocked in local streams are raised and drove through Moccassin Creek State Park and saw many campers.

   

We also saw devastation from the tornado that came through this region in May in the Lake Burton area. Many workers were tearing down trees and leveling off the land to get the area ready for people to build their homes back up again. If you click on the photo and look closely, you can see the path of that tornado. They certainly have a long way to go but are making remarkable progress.

We never get tired of the mountain views and the pretty landscaping that surrounds many of the areas up in Northern Georgia. We feel very fortunate to own a RV site in Dillard that we can come to in the summertime to enjoy.

After our day trip, Kozmo was wiped out. She was very tired and slept through the night without hardly moving. She enjoys her truck rides very much.

‘Til next time…..

A Little Bit of Everything…for the past 2 weeks

It has been a long time since I have posted, and since Jeff is spending a lot of time reading from a Kindle and practicing on his new diddley bow (more on those topics later) I figured I would post today so our friends and family know we are just fine. I’ll try and get you caught up on our activities of the last two weeks. So here goes Reporter Barbie :-)

We took Kozmo to the vet on June 3 for the first time since we got her at the end of February. She supposedly had shots, a check-up etc in January. But, I wanted to make sure she was fine and up to date with blood work, etc. The vet, named Dr. Oakes, and his assistant, Joe, are great professionals located at Rabun Animal Hospital in Mountain City, GA. The place is very clean and they treated Kozmo like a queen.

Her blood work came back normal and she is in excellent shape for a girl that will turn 8 years old. Since we don’t know her exact birthday, we decided that July 4 would be her big day. So most likely we will have a birthday party for her……I will make Doggie Peanut Butter cookies and she will have a great day of being outdoors among puppy friends here at River Vista Mountain Village…haha

On June 4, I turned 56 years young and Jeff took us out to La Cabana, a Mexican restaurant in Dillard. It was fantastic! We both had fajitas with Mexican flan for dessert. We were so happy when they opened up another location in Dillard in April. They have a location in Clayton, which is 10 minutes south of us that we’ve visited previously.

On the subject of food, we went to Kountry Vittles in Rabun Gap for breakfast last week and it was very good and inexpensive. We actually had fried bologna with our eggs and it tasted so good!!! Neither of us has had fried bologna in many, many years. We haven’t been eating out like we used to because I just love our kitchen in the fifth wheel. I have been cooking lots of great stuff, such as spaghetti casserole, a ziti casserole, grilled pork loin, chicken ala king, and homemade soups and desserts. I had to cut back on making sweets because we are eating too much. So now I only make sweets once a week. Last night I made a cherry cobbler and put vanilla ice cream over it. Jeff said it was delicious!!! When you retire and you think of what you will eat for the day or even the week, it seems like life just revolves around food. But, we now have time to enjoy the food and the shopping. Ingles is my FAVORITE grocery store and I can spend hours in that place. They also have a Starbucks kiosk in the store which doesn’t hurt either. I can still remember when I had 17 minutes to actually eat my food when I was teaching. We had to walk the students to the cafeteria and usually waited for the last lunch of students to come out before we took them inside to sit down. Then it was our time to eat, use the bathroom and clean up before we were required to pick them up at the cafeteria. I often wondered why the teachers’ union wasn’t called since we never got 30 minutes of duty free lunch time which is called for in the teacher contract.

I started growing some heirloom tomatoes and yellow squash once we got up here. The tomatoes are coming out and the yellow squash is showing up in clusters. We can’t wait to eat them….. and hopefully not get sick. LOL

We finally broke down and bought a Kindle. I think we owe that to Nick Russell, publisher of the Gypsy Journal magazine and a fulltime rver. He writes a daily blog, Nick’s Blog,  and just published his first book called The Big Lake. He put it on Amazon.com as an e-book for 99 cents. We bought the Kindle and downloaded his book first. It was a fantastic read! Jeff read it first, then I read it. Now Jeff is reading two other books on it while I have decided to finish up all of my books that I have in the rig before I order anything on the Kindle. By then, we might need another Kindle so each of us has one???? I still love going to used book stores and buying the paperbacks at a very reasonable price. I even go to the Rabun County Library if they have the book I am looking for.

We took Kozmo to “Goats on the Roof”, a local tourist stop/country store in Tiger, on Thursday. This place has goats to feed that actually graze on the buildings roofs. See pictures below. The store has homemade jams and vegetables, beverages, snacks, tee shirts, and local arts and crafts. They have a deli that serves Amish food but we didn’t try it this time. I thought Kozmo would like the goats but she was very nonchalant about it. There was a mama goat and her four very white baby goats in a pen when we walked her to the fenced in area. She sniffed them and just wanted to leave. They just stared at her. It was very cute.

  

    

We had a little trouble with our golf cart a week ago. One of the batteries had two cells which would not hold the distilled water when I tried to top them off. When we took it out, four of the sides had expanded and cracked. We took it down to our buddy Eddie in Tallulah Falls at All-American Carts where we purchased it last year and he gave us a battery. Eddie’s a story himself. When we went to look at golf carts last year we met him. Just so happens he attended the same middle school in Brandon that I taught at and retired from last June. Small world huh? Unfortunately that first battery he gave us was a bad one. I had charged it up and we took the golf cart for a ride and it stopped down the hill from us. Jeff pushed it while I steered it for awhile as it died out. Our neighbor, another Jeff, helped us out with pushing it into our site with his cart. Thank heavens he did because I thought Jeff’s back was going to cause him some trouble pushing it uphill himself. Eddie came back out to our site Monday morning at 6:45 and brought a new battery and fixed the control panel for free. He is such a great guy!!! We recommend people go buy a golf cart from him.

During one of Jeff’s “surfing” adventures on the internet he came across a “diddley bow”. The diddley bow, according to Wikipedia, is a string instrument of African origin made popular in America, probably developed from instruments found on the Ghana coast of west Africa. The diddley bow is rarely heard outside the rural south. Other nicknames for this instrument include “jitterbug” or “one-string,” while an ethnomusicologist would formally call it a “monochord zither.” The diddley bow derives from instruments used in West Africa. There, they were often played by children, one beating the string with sticks and the other changing the pitch by moving a slide up and down. The instrument was then developed as a children's toy by slaves in the United States. They were first documented in the rural South by researchers in the 1930s. The diddley bow is typically homemade, consisting usually of a wooden board and a single wire string stretched between two screws, and played by plucking while varying the pitch with a metal or glass slide held in the other hand. A glass bottle is usually used as the bridge, which helps magnify the sound. The diddley bow has traditionally been considered an "entry-level" instrument, normally played by adolescent boys, who then graduate to a "normal" guitar if they show promise on the diddley bow. Jeff’s always wanted to play a musical instrument so he figured if it was to be, it would be with a diddley bow. He must be resorting to his adolescence. He ordered one online that was made by a gentleman from West Virginia. It along with a small amplifier arrived a couple of days ago. I’ll let Jeff keep you updated on his progress and post some pictures of his new “toy.” :-)

Well, I’ve written much about really nothing. I think I was reliving a Seinfeld episode where our lives are really about nothing but we make it seem glamorous and fulfilling for us. Maybe they will make a TV sitcom about us……”Boldt’s Castle Chronicles”.

Remember to live each moment to the fullest!